Dylan Wan

Here is the typical lifecycle for data warehouse deployment project:

0. Project Scoping and Planning

Project Triangle - Scope, Time and Resource.

• Determine the scope of the project - what you would like to accomplish? This can be defined by questions to be answered. The number of logical star and number of the OLTP sources
• Time - What is the target date for the system to be available to the users
• Resource - What is our budget? What is the role and profile requirement of the resources needed to make this happen.

1. Requirement

• What are the business questions? How does the answers of these questions can change the business decision or trigger actions.
• What are the role of the users? How often do they use the system? Do they do any interactive reporting or just view the defined reports in guided navigation?
• How do you measure? What are the metrics?

2. Front-End Design

• The front end design needs for both interactive analysis and the designed analytics workflow.
• How does the user interact with the system?
• What are their analysis process?

3. Warehouse Schema Design

• Dimensional modeling - define the dimensions and fact and define the grain of each star schema.
• Define the physical schema - depending on the technology decision. If you use the relational tecknology, design the database tables

4. OLTP to data warehouse mapping

• Logical mapping - table to table and column to column mapping. Also define the transformation rules
• You may need to perform OLTP data profiling. How often the data changes? What are the data distribution?
• ETL Design -include data staging and the detail ETL process flow.

5. Implementation

• Create the warehouse and ETL staging schema
• Develop the ETL programs
• Create the logical to physical mapping in the repository
• Build the end user dashboard and reports

6. Deployment

• Install the Analytics reporting and the ETL tools.
• Specific Setup and Configuration for OLTP, ETL, and data warehouse.
• Sizing of the system and database
• Performance Tuning and Optimization

7. Management and Maintenance of the system

• Ongoing support of the end-users, including security, training, and enhancing the system.
• You need to monitor the growth of the data.

To develop or deploy a BI solution for your organizations, you need to have the right people involved in the time time. Here are typical roles involved in a BI data warehouse project.

• Project Sponsor
• Project Manager
• Functional Analyst
• SME
• BI Architect
• ETL Developers
• DBA

The job description and responsibilities are listed in this table: Read the rest of this entry >>